Youtube's stilted, one-sided dispute resolution system allows game companies like Nintendo to confiscate the earnings of gamers who produce hugely popular "Let's Play" videos.

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Youtube's stilted, one-sided dispute resolution system allows game companies like Nintendo to confiscate the earnings of gamers who produce hugely popular "Let's Play" videos.

The shakedown has been a scandal since 2013, but the situation is getting worse, not better. The only way to be sure that your Nintendo Let's Play videos won't be removed and your Youtube account suspended is to enter into an agreement with Nintendo that only allows you to review the games they select, and only in ways they permit.

The Let's Play videos are almost all certainly fair use, but there's no good case-law on them, and the uncertainty of the legal outcome, combined with Youtube's automated, one-sided system for resolving copyright complaints makes the creators behind the videos vulnerable to blackmail from Nintendo.

Under Youtube's system, Nintendo is able to claim videos even if only a few seconds of game footage appear in them. If creators dispute Nintendo's claim, then Youtube asks Nintendo to decide whether the claim is fair (!), and after several more back-and-forths, the creators can ask for Youtube to examine the video, long after its currency and relevance has faded. If Youtube rules against them, they get a strike. After three strikes, Youtube suspends them and deletes all their creations.

If you’re video maker who’s had a video flagged and you want to dispute it, the process is Kafkaesque. The copyright holder alone decides the outcome: It can uphold its claim. It can agree that your video does not infringe its copyright. Or it can do nothing at all for 30 days, during which time all advertising is suspended. Most likely, your video eventually is returned to you—but by that point, the damage is done.

“Videos generally make most of their Google AdSense money within the first thirty days of an upload,” intellectual property attorney Stephen McArthur wrote in a post for Gamasutra. McArthur argues YouTube should continue collecting the ad revenue and hold it in escrow until the dispute is resolved.

Should you appeal, the copyright holder has the same three options: agree with you, disagree with you, or do nothing and let you have the video back in another month. At no point does YouTube intercede. In other words, the entire process could as long as two months, with the outcome decided entirely by the people arguing you owe them something.
You’re Expected to Basically Doxx Yourself

At any time during this process, the copyright holder could decide to abandon YouTube’s adjudication process and simply file a legally binding takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. All that’s required is sending YouTube a written notice that includes the phrase, “I have a good faith belief that the use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

At that point, YouTube has no choice but to take the video down. You can file a counter-notice, at which point the copyright holder must take you to court and make its case, or allow the video to go back up.

“Typically they issue the copyright strike, you dispute it, basically telling them that they’ll see you in court, and they get to take your video down for two weeks, during which time you’re not making anything off of it,” Sterling says. “You’ve made a video no one can view, and you can’t monetize. So they just get to screw with your business for two weeks.”

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/27/youtube-and-nintendo-conspire.html/feed0San Francisco Sheriff's Deputy ring accused of pit-fighting inmateshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/27/san-francisco-sheriffs-deput.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/27/san-francisco-sheriffs-deput.html#commentsFri, 27 Mar 2015 16:00:23 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=375941
San Francisco sheriff's deputy Scott Neu is accused of leading a ring of corrupt jail guards who coerced prisoners into gladiatorial combat with threats of rape and violence.]]>
San Francisco sheriff's deputy Scott Neu is accused of leading a ring of corrupt jail guards who coerced prisoners into gladiatorial combat with threats of rape and violence.

Neu serves at County Jail No. 4 at 850 Bryant St despite having settled claims that he raped a woman prisoner and two transgendered prisoners while working at the jail. He sports a tattoo reading "850 Mob," believed to describe the name used by the corrupt deputies to describe themselves. At least four other deputies are implicated in the program of sexualized torture.

The San Francisco Public Defender's Office had undertaken an investigation into Neu's behavior, in cooperation with an independent private investigator, and had planned to issue their report only after the prisoners who came forward were released and safe from retaliatory violence. However, Neu had reportedly planned a fresh round of fights, leading to a hasty release of their findings.

Neu and his co-conspirators gambled on the outcome of fights. One fight pitted the smallest inmate in the jail against the largest, and the fighters say they were threatened with rape and beatings by the guards if they didn't spar. Neu is also said to have coerced prisoners into training for the fights with threats of rape and violence. Neu has a reputation for sadistic practices overall, including making prisoners gamble to receive their food, clothes and comfort items. Even when prisoners won the games Neu forced on them with the red dice and the deck of cards he carried, he would sometimes take away their "winnings" and give them to other prisoners.

The Deputies' Union attorney Harry Stern claims the Public Defender is making a big deal out of nothing. He says that the prisoners were encouraged to "wrestle to settle disputes about who was stronger," and were "encouraged" to work out. He dismissed the entire affair as "little more than horseplay."

In Los Angeles, Sheriff's office officials are under investigation for similar "horseplay": sexually abusing child prisoners, rape, and murder.

Meanwhile, Police Chief Greg Suhr said he received the report from Adachi and that his department will be investigating to see if there is any criminal wrongdoing.

The allegations “are egregious enough that I forwarded them on (to the special investigations division),” he said.

District Attorney George Gascón called the allegations “deplorable.”

“Common sense indicates that such conduct does not occur without the knowledge of numerous people,” he said in a statement. “These allegations require an independent and thorough investigation into the practices and supervision of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department.”

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/27/san-francisco-sheriffs-deput.html/feed0Here's the TSA's stupid, secret list of behavioral terrorism tellshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/27/heres-the-tsas-stupid-sec.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/27/heres-the-tsas-stupid-sec.html#commentsFri, 27 Mar 2015 14:18:48 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=375967
The ACLU is suing the TSA to get the details of its billion-dollar junk-science "behavioral detection" program, but in the meantime, here's the leaked 92-point checklist the TSA's psychic warriors use to spot bad guys.]]>
The ACLU is suing the TSA to get the details of its billion-dollar junk-science "behavioral detection" program, but in the meantime, here's the leaked 92-point checklist the TSA's psychic warriors use to spot bad guys.

The list -- not classified, but also not available to the public, somehow -- was leaked to the Intercept by "a source concerned about the quality of the program." The list includes such terrorism-tells as "a bobbing adam's apple," "arriving late," "trembling," "yawning," "excessive throat clearing," "improper attire," "gazing down," and "wide open staring eyes," Also: "being in disguise."

But if you appear to be married, are over 55, or are a woman over 55, you get points deducted from your terrorism score. Men get their not-a-terrorist bonus at 65.

One former Behavior Detection Officer manager, who asked not to be identified, said that SPOT indicators are used by law enforcement to justify pulling aside anyone officers find suspicious, rather than acting as an actual checklist for specific indicators. “The SPOT sheet was designed in such a way that virtually every passenger will exhibit multiple ‘behaviors’ that can be assigned a SPOT sheet value,” the former manager said.

The signs of deception and fear “are ridiculous,” the source continued. “These are just ‘catch all’ behaviors to justify BDO interaction with a passenger. A license to harass.”

The observations of a TSA screener or a Behavior Detection Officer shouldn’t be the basis for referring someone to law enforcement. “The program is flawed and unnecessarily delays and harasses travelers. Taxpayer dollars would be better spent funding real police at TSA checkpoints,” the former manager said.

A second former Behavior Detection Officer manager, who also asked not to be identified, told The Intercept that the program suffers from lack of science and simple inconsistency, with every airport training its officers differently. “The SPOT program is bullshit,” the manager told The Intercept. “Complete bullshit.”

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/27/heres-the-tsas-stupid-sec.html/feed0TPP leak: states give companies the right to repeal nations' lawshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/tpp-leak-states-give-companie.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/tpp-leak-states-give-companie.html#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 20:54:48 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=375714
A new Wikileaks-published leak from the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty reveals a January 2015 draft "Investment Chapter" of the agreement, where the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are set out.]]>
A new Wikileaks-published leak from the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty reveals a January 2015 draft "Investment Chapter" of the agreement, where the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are set out. They allow companies to repeal nations' environmental, health and labor laws.

The ISDS work is led by the USA. Under its terms, a treaty-established tribunal would have the power to overrule national courts, and to award millions from tax-coffers to companies who believe that laws undermine their future profits.

The US Congress is preparing to hand Obama's trade rep fast-track authority to enter into TPP, though the terms of the deal can't be disclosed for at least four years (Congress only just got its first look at the TPP, and the USTR threatened to jail Members if they disclosed its contents to voters).

The TPP Investment Chapter, published today, is dated 20 January 2015. The document is classified and supposed to be kept secret for four years after the entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement is reached, for four years from the close of the negotiations...

The Investment Chapter highlights the intent of the TPP negotiating parties, led by the United States, to increase the power of global corporations by creating a supra-national court, or tribunal, where foreign firms can "sue" states and obtain taxpayer compensation for "expected future profits". These investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals are designed to overrule the national court systems. ISDS tribunals introduce a mechanism by which multinational corporations can force governments to pay compensation if the tribunal states that a country's laws or policies affect the company's claimed future profits. In return, states hope that multinationals will invest more. Similar mechanisms have already been used. For example, US tobacco company Phillip Morris used one such tribunal to sue Australia (June 2011 – ongoing) for mandating plain packaging of tobacco products on public health grounds; and by the oil giant Chevron against Ecuador in an attempt to evade a multi-billion-dollar compensation ruling for polluting the environment. The threat of future lawsuits chilled environmental and other legislation in Canada after it was sued by pesticide companies in 2008/9. ISDS tribunals are often held in secret, have no appeal mechanism, do not subordinate themselves to human rights laws or the public interest, and have few means by which other affected parties can make representations.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/tpp-leak-states-give-companie.html/feed0Australia outlaws warrant canarieshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-cana.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-cana.html#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 19:24:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=375679
The exceptionally broad new surveillance bill lets the government do nearly unlimited warrantless mass surveillance, even of lawyer-client privileged communications, and bans warrant canaries, making it an offense to "disclose information about the existence or non-existence" of a warrant to spy on journalists.]]>
The exceptionally broad new surveillance bill lets the government do nearly unlimited warrantless mass surveillance, even of lawyer-client privileged communications, and bans warrant canaries, making it an offense to "disclose information about the existence or non-existence" of a warrant to spy on journalists.

Despite that move away from retaining communications metadata by the EU and continuing concerns in the US about the National Security Agency's bulk phone metadata spying program, the Australian government was able to push through the amendments implementing data retention thanks to the support of the main opposition party. Labor agreed to vote in favor of the Bill once a requirement to use special "journalist information warrants" was introduced for access to journalists' metadata, with a view to shielding their sources. No warrant is required for obtaining the metadata of other classes of users, not even privileged communications between lawyers and their clients. Even for journalists, the extra protection is weak, and the definition of what constitutes a journalist is rather narrow—bloggers and occasional writers are probably not covered.

Warrant canaries can't be used in this context either. Section 182A of the new law says that a person commits an offense if he or she discloses or uses information about "the existence or non-existence of such a [journalist information] warrant." The penalty upon conviction is two years imprisonment.

During the relatively quick passage of the amendments, the Australian government made the usual argument that metadata needs to be retained for long periods in order to fight terrorism and serious crime—even though the German experience is that, in practice, data retention does not help. Toward the end of the debate, when concerns about journalist sources were raised, one senior member of the Australian government adopted a more unusual approach to calming people's fears.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-cana.html/feed0Sandwars: the mafias whose illegal sand mines make whole islands vanishhttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/sandwars-the-mafias-whose-ill.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/sandwars-the-mafias-whose-ill.html#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 19:00:45 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=375624
Singapore's insatiable appetite for sand to use to expand its island's territory has led to a worldwide boom in illegal sand-mining, run by criminal gangs who are responsible for the destruction of entire islands in the Pacific rim.]]>
Singapore's insatiable appetite for sand to use to expand its island's territory has led to a worldwide boom in illegal sand-mining, run by criminal gangs who are responsible for the destruction of entire islands in the Pacific rim.

Sand smugglers also serve the construction industry, especially in Morocco. The illegal sand mines are all over the world, but they're at their most vicious in India, where sand mafias murder and intimidate as they steal whole beaches and turn the land into moonscapes of house-sized excavation pits.

An essential and chilling Wired article by Vince Beiser tells the story beautifully, and Adam Ferguson's accompanying photos are brilliant.

All of that has spawned a worldwide boom in illegal sand mining. On Indonesia’s island of Bali, far inland from the tourist beaches, I visit a sand mining area. It looks like Shangri-la after a meteor strike. Smack in the middle of a beautiful valley winding between verdant mountains, surrounded by jungle and rice paddies, is a raggedy 14-acre black pit of exposed sand and rock. On its floor, men in shorts and flip-flops wield sledgehammers and shovels to load sand and gravel into clattering, smoke-belching sorting machines.

Multinationals dredge it up with massive machines. Locals dig it out with shovels. Everywhere, sand mining wreaks havoc.

“Those who have permits to dig for sand have to pay for land restoration,” says Nyoman Sadra, a former member of the regional legislature. “But 70 percent of the sand miners have no permits.” Even companies with permits spread bribes around so they can get away with digging pits wider or deeper than they’re allowed to.

Today criminal gangs in an estimated 70 countries, from Jamaica to Nigeria, dredge up tons of the stuff every year to sell on the black market. Half the sand used for construction in Morocco is estimated to be mined illegally; whole stretches of beach there are disappearing. One of Israel’s most notorious gangsters, a man allegedly involved in a spate of recent car bombings, got his start stealing sand from public beaches. Dozens of Malaysian officials were charged in 2010 with accepting bribes and sexual favors in exchange for allowing illegally mined sand to be smuggled into Singapore.

But nowhere is the struggle for sand more ferocious than in India. Battles among and against “sand mafias” there have reportedly killed hundreds of people in recent years—including police officers, government officials, and ordinary people like Paleram Chauhan.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/sandwars-the-mafias-whose-ill.html/feed0Bankrupt Radio Shack will sell the customer data they promised to keep privatehttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/25/bankrupt-radio-shack-will-sell.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/25/bankrupt-radio-shack-will-sell.html#commentsWed, 25 Mar 2015 14:18:20 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=375250
They were the first company to dabble in a laughably crude version of the surveillance business-model, aggressively collecting your address every time you bought batteries so they could get into the direct-mail racket.]]>
They were the first company to dabble in a laughably crude version of the surveillance business-model, aggressively collecting your address every time you bought batteries so they could get into the direct-mail racket.

Now that they're out of business (and where will we get our VHS cleaning cassettes now?), their bankruptcy trustees are going to sell all that data they promised they wouldn't sell or share. They're even flogging the data they collected on behalf of AT&T, which was only supposed to be used by the phone company. Congrats, Radio Shack, you've managed to shock a US company over private data handling practices!

The states claim that RadioShack told its online customers (PDF) that "We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to anyone at any time." Signs at RadioShack's brick-and-mortar stores had similar language, according to the suit. "The information you give us is treated with discretion and respect. We pride ourselves on not selling our private mailing list. From time to time, we may send you information from our company or from select, responsible companies that may join with RadioShack to bring you special offers," said a sign at a Florida store, according to an exhibit (PDF).

It's not just the states that are objecting. AT&T claims that part of the data isn't even RadioShack's to sell and instead is AT&T's through a mobile-phone selling arrangement.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/25/bankrupt-radio-shack-will-sell.html/feed0Transparency, New Jersey stylehttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/20/transparency-new-jersey-style.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/20/transparency-new-jersey-style.html#commentsFri, 20 Mar 2015 21:39:26 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=374230
Efrem writes, "The Jersey Journal is doing some good work during Sunshine Week, trying to publish the pay information of every public employee in the county.]]>
Efrem writes, "The Jersey Journal is doing some good work during Sunshine Week, trying to publish the pay information of every public employee in the county. The results have been hilariously depressing. To whit:"

"Jersey City's school district, as one example, provided an Excel spreadsheet, but instead of emailing it, district officials burned it onto a compact disc and mailed it to The Jersey Journal's office, along with a note asking for one dollar to reimburse the district for the cost of the CD.

When the newspaper filed a subsequent, related OPRA request and alerted district officials that they could email the file over at no cost, the district again mailed a CD containing an Excel file, along with a request for a second dollar."

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/20/transparency-new-jersey-style.html/feed0Obama moots mandatory votinghttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/20/obama-moots-mandatory-voting.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/20/obama-moots-mandatory-voting.html#commentsFri, 20 Mar 2015 12:24:31 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=374061
I agree that mandatory voting is a powerful check against moneyed interests hijacking the government, but Australia, which has both mandatory voting and preferential ranked ballots, has still managed to elect some fucking awful politicians.]]>
I agree that mandatory voting is a powerful check against moneyed interests hijacking the government, but Australia, which has both mandatory voting and preferential ranked ballots, has still managed to elect some fucking awful politicians.

"Other countries have mandatory voting," Obama said Wednesday in Cleveland, where he spoke about the importance of middle class economics, and was asked about the issue during a town hall.

"It would be transformative if everybody voted -- that would counteract money more than anything," he said, adding it was the first time he had shared the idea publicly.

The clout of millionaires and billionaires in campaign funding has been enormous, and many claim the uber wealthy have undue leverage in politics.

"The people who tend not to vote are young, they're lower income, they're skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups," Obama said. "There's a reason why some folks try to keep them away from the polls."

At least 26 countries have compulsory voting, according to the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Failure to vote is punishable by a fine in countries such as Australia and Belgium; if you fail to pay your fine in Belgium, you could go to prison.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/20/obama-moots-mandatory-voting.html/feed0Insider view of the cash-for-gold ripoffhttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/insider-view-of-the-cash-for-g.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/insider-view-of-the-cash-for-g.html#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 19:00:46 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=373381
Cash-for-gold is a con so dodgy that it's visible from space, but Clancy Martin's inside account of working in his brother's rip-off high-class Texas pawnbroker is an especially compelling view of the internals of the ripoff.]]>
Cash-for-gold is a con so dodgy that it's visible from space, but Clancy Martin's inside account of working in his brother's rip-off high-class Texas pawnbroker is an especially compelling view of the internals of the ripoff.

I’ll tell you how it’s done. Let’s say you have a fourteen-karat gold ring that weighs fifteen grams, or about half an ounce, and gold is at one thousand dollars an ounce. First you weigh it and show the customer that it’s fifteen grams. Then you take the price of an ounce of gold and divide it by thirty-one to get a gram price for pure.

“Now we multiply that by fourteen for fourteen karat and divide it by twenty-four for twenty-four karat, which is what it would be if it were 100 percent gold,” you explain to the seller. “That gives us the price for your fourteen-karat gold. Multiply that by fifteen, for fifteen grams. Now, fourteen karat is 56 percent gold and 44 percent base metal, which burns off at the smelter, so we multiply that by 0.56. Finally, we deduct 10 percent for the smelter, and 15 percent for my profit. Most gold buyers will charge you 20 or 25 percent, which is a reasonable profit margin, but we do such high quantity of gold-buying here that we can afford very low margins. That gives us a final figure of…”

You get the picture. The customer’s ring is worth $280 in real gold value. But you just offered $120, with a seemingly sound mathematical justification. And you’ve left yourself plenty of wiggle room if they want to haggle your profit down from 15 percent to 10 percent or even 7.5 percent. The real key to this scam is that you’ve deducted for the impurity of fourteen karat not once but twice: first, when you calculated the per-gram price and again when you “deduct for the base metal.” Furthermore, your smelter will charge you at most 5 percent—often less, depending on the quantity—and if it’s a nice piece you’ll never melt it down anyway. You’ll send it to your jeweler to make it look brand-new and put it in the showcase for retail. The key, as with my diamond buy back at Fort Worth Gold, is not to let them leave your office. And you do that by staring them in the eye and lying: “No one will offer you a better price. That’s the reason you’re here. Everybody knows we pay the highest.” Hold the customer’s gaze until they look away. Push their jewelry toward them, as though you really don’t want to buy it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred—
especially if you have a luxurious, busy store—your customer will wilt. The fact is, they’re already weakened: that’s what they’re doing in your store in the first place. They need the money. It’s not quite stealing gold fillings out of the pulled teeth of weary soldiers, but it’s the same principle. Use your expertise to exploit the weakness of someone who doesn’t know any better, and do it in a situation in which he believes he has reason to trust you. Why would a wealthy diamond merchant in a three-thousand-dollar suit want to cheat me out of a hundred bucks’ worth of gold?

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/insider-view-of-the-cash-for-g.html/feed0Clinton's sensitive email was passed through a third-party spam filtering servicehttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/clintons-sensitive-email-was.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/clintons-sensitive-email-was.html#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 16:00:03 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=373377
It's been years since the spam wars were at the front of the debate, but all the salient points from then remain salient today: when you let unaccountable third parties see your mail and decide which messages you can see, the potential for mischief is unlimited.]]>
It's been years since the spam wars were at the front of the debate, but all the salient points from then remain salient today: when you let unaccountable third parties see your mail and decide which messages you can see, the potential for mischief is unlimited.

Hilary Clinton used Mxlogic -- now a division of Intel -- to filter her clintonemail.com mail. The service would have received all of her email before it was forwarded on to her. Sensitive and confidential matters of state were exposed to untrustworthy insiders and spies/crooks who penetrated their network.

So I thought, what if she has web mail? And sure enough – I GOT A LOGIN PROMPT! https://mail.clintonemail.com And I have verified by the SSL certificate that this is indeed the clintonemail.com server – still online! Click here and type in mail.clintonemail.com

I already tried hillary2016 for the password and that didn’t work. But I’m looking at this and thinking WTF!

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/clintons-sensitive-email-was.html/feed0Canadian court hands a gimme to copyright trollshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/canadian-court-hands-a-gimme-t.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/canadian-court-hands-a-gimme-t.html#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 15:26:00 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=373418
Michael Geist writes, "Canada's Federal Court has issued its ruling on the costs in the Voltage-TekSavvy case, a case involving the demand for the names and address of thousands of TekSavvy subscribers by Voltage on copyright infringement grounds.]]>
Michael Geist writes, "Canada's Federal Court has issued its ruling on the costs in the Voltage-TekSavvy case, a case involving the demand for the names and address of thousands of TekSavvy subscribers by Voltage on copyright infringement grounds. Last year, the court opened the door to TekSavvy disclosing the names and addresses, but also established new safeguards against copyright trolling in Canada. The decision required Voltage to pay TekSavvy's costs and builds in court oversight over any demand letters sent by Voltage."

The issue of costs required another hearing with very different views of the costs associated with the case. TekSavvy claimed costs of $346,480.68 (mainly legal fees and technical costs associated with complying with the order), while Voltage argued the actual costs should be $884. The court disagreed with both sides, settling on costs of $21,557.50 or roughly $11 per subscriber name and address. The decision unpacks all the cost claims, but the key finding was that costs related to the initial motion over whether there should be disclosure of subscriber information was separate from the costs of abiding by the order the court ultimately issued. The motion judge did not address costs at the time and the court now says it is too late to address them.

With TekSavvy now bearing all of those motion costs (in addition to costs associated with informing customers), the decision sends a warning signal to ISPs that getting involved in these cases can lead to significant costs that won't be recouped. That is a bad message for privacy. So is the likely outcome for future cases (should they arise) with subscribers left with fewer notices and information from their ISP given the costs involved and the court's decision to not compensate for those costs.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/18/canadian-court-hands-a-gimme-t.html/feed0Following the key Trans-Pacific Partnership senator with a 30' blimphttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/17/following-the-key-trans-pacifi.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/17/following-the-key-trans-pacifi.html#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 06:31:51 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=373370
Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "The folks who wrote SOPA are trying to get extremist copyright provisions into the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement -- the one that Congress is trying to 'Fast Track' right now."

"There's one senator who's absolutely key to whether or not this moves forward, so last week we followed him across his home state ...

]]>

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "The folks who wrote SOPA are trying to get extremist copyright provisions into the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement -- the one that Congress is trying to 'Fast Track' right now."

"There's one senator who's absolutely key to whether or not this moves forward, so last week we followed him across his home state ... with a giant 30-foot blimp!"

Ron Wyden has an amazing track record as a defender of a free, fair and open Internet. We need him to step up on TPP.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/17/following-the-key-trans-pacifi.html/feed0Jeb Bush sold patronage and favors to his top political donorshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/15/jeb-bush-sold-patronage-and-fa.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/15/jeb-bush-sold-patronage-and-fa.html#commentsSun, 15 Mar 2015 16:13:05 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=372440
The AP analysis of Bush's 275,000 FOIA'ed emails show that "donations" to his campaign were really more like "purchases."

Of course, this is what everyone suspects -- indeed, is certain of -- in the case of politicians.

]]>
The AP analysis of Bush's 275,000 FOIA'ed emails show that "donations" to his campaign were really more like "purchases."

Of course, this is what everyone suspects -- indeed, is certain of -- in the case of politicians. But it's one thing to see the money come in and the appointments flow out, and another to read the elected officials corresponding with their staffers saying, basically, "Hey, this guy gave me a lot of money, let's give him this plum appointment."

By the way, I'd be pretty fucking surprised if H Clinton's complete email trove was any less damning.

Take William ‘Bill’ Becker, a Florida citrus grower and longtime Republican donor. “He was among the circle of loyalists invited to huddle with Bush in December to hear about his presidential ambitions,” the AP wrote, citing Becker’s years of concurrent political donations to Bush and lobbying him on matters ranging from state citrus marketing funds, appointments to a citrus marketing board and hospital association, and college donations.

Speaking of a candidate to the Florida Citrus Commission, who Bush did appoint, Becker wrote, “She and her family have been loyal supporters… You met her at the Governor's Mansion on one occasion and I believe you may have met her at the Florida House event at our home. I believe she is immensely well qualified to serve on the Florida Citrus Commission.”

Nine days later, after she got the post, Becker wrote, “Many thanks for an expedited and wonderful appointment.”

The AP’s example of Becker’s interactions with Bush is not unique. The issues may not be as riveting as whether Bush tried to prevent a hospital from turning off the life support system for Terri Schaivo—a major issue for some conservative Christians, or fight federal government efforts to send Elian Gonzales, a Cuban child, back to that country in a custody dispute. But they are what the daily life of a governor often consists of. If anything, the New Yorker's recent profile of Bush's efforts to privatize public education and how that made him and a handful of business colleagues wealthy, is a much more troubling picture of political corruption.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/13/nypd-caught-wikiwashing-wikipe.html/feed0What should the next Aaron Swartz do when the DOJ knocks?http://boingboing.net/2015/03/12/aaron-swartz-and-impact-litiga.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/12/aaron-swartz-and-impact-litiga.html#commentsThu, 12 Mar 2015 11:00:33 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=370400
[Ed: please see the bottom of this article for an important clarification]

I am among those who have seen the recently released documentary about Aaron Swartz's short life, The Internet's Own Boy. I watched the film in light of my own experiences as a lawyer and paralegal engaged in social justice battles for more than four decades.

I have been an advocate and media organizer for rights causes involving individuals and groups seeking access to justice through Canada's legal system. I've taken on more than 70 cases that changed Canadian law, helping to establish employment rights for gay people (eventually followed by changes in provinces' human rights codes to include sexual orientation as a prohibited category for discrimination); compensation for discrimination against Black nurses who lacked sufficient support from their union; affirming the historic right of private prosecution in a unanimous Supreme Court decision against the Ontario government; establishing sexual harassment at work as a workplace safety issue -- thereby allowing female employees to get rapid redress; litigating on behalf of victims of the RCMP Security Service that contributed to its disbanding and civilian reconstitution; achieving the largest awards in a human rights case and in a rent abatement case in Canada and winning a precedent-setting ruling against a multi-national corporation seeking to monopolize control over domain names. In these and other struggles, my weapons of choice were committees of mutual support, rallies, and publishing to broad audiences. These experiences prompted me to consider how Aaron Swartz might have pursued a more aggressive public campaign as part of his legal defense.

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested for a bold act of apparent disobedience―he accessed the JSTOR repository of scholarly articles. According to his prosecutors, he intended to release these to the public. Corporations whose profits depended on charging to access scholarship were not amused. Still, none of them chose to sue. Only the United States federal prosecutors pressed the case, intending to make an example of Aaron. They couldn't ignore his conduct. It would have been a precedent that, if allowed to stand, would be a beacon for others.

Much blame has been placed on ham-handed prosecutors like Stephen Heymann who tried to hammer Aaron into submission. When Aaron and his supporters embarrassed the prosecutor by publicly questioning the prosecution's legitimacy, Heymann and his colleagues retaliated by adding a long list of new charges to Aaron's case. They turned his alleged unauthorized access to a network -- usually dismissed as a misdemeanor "continuance without a finding" -- into a massive federal indictment.

This was a scare tactic to frighten Aaron into submission. First, the stick: a potential sentence of 35 years. Then, the carrot: a few months in jail. The feds wanted capitulation, a guilty plea.

Supervising U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz needed a guilty plea to finesse Aaron's brazen attack against the privatization of knowledge. The ruthless, ambitious Heymann wasn't just lead prosecutor in the case -- he was also hoping to burnish his credentials for a future political career.

Swartz was accused of something more threatening than a property offense―he had launched a public interest attack on the commodification of knowledge. There was no violation of copyright law. There was no trespass on federal property. There was no privacy violation. Downloading a scholar's article, even numerous times, cannot constitutionally constitute a felony under U.S. law.

The prosecutors didn't want to try the untested constitutionality of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) in a highly publicized court case. They knew Aaron's case wouldn't be easy for them to win if it went to trial. They were ready to give Aaron a kiss for a plea. One of Aaron's lawyers, Marty Weinberg, nearly negotiated a plea bargain that would have kept Aaron outside of a cell completely. The punishment was negotiable -- within limits. The government sought an admission of guilt and time in prison so it could show its mettle in defending privately (and profitably) controlled access to information.

With hindsight, it appears that the 18 months spent negotiating a plea with the feds was wasted. But going to trial was tremendously risky: though a victory could have resulted in the law being declared unconstitutional, the downside was the threat of an outrageously lengthy jail term. Pleading guilty could have resulted in a comparatively light sentence (and a felony on his record)..

Aaron's lawyers knew well that federal felony prosecutions result in findings of guilt 93% of the time ( U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Annual Statistical Report). Of course, many of Aaron's family and friends focused on winning a sure deal to keep Aaron out of jail with his morale intact. For some, including, it seems Aaron, a highly publicized public campaign to prove his innocence by striking the law from the books raised the stakes too high.

The bullying prosecutors were intransigent. Although Aaron's lawyers were willing and able to contest the power of the Dept. of Justice, if directed, the uncertainty of the outcome strongly suggested a more sober approach. They pleaded instead for mercy, even sharing information with the feds about Aaron's mental health history. But in my experience though, the cold and calculating representatives of officialdom never care about the personal troubles of the victim of abusive laws when a political agenda is at stake.

Aaron's acts were harmless: there was no physical harm, no economic harm. JSTOR could not prove it lost a cent. It never sought compensation -- there was nothing to compensate! Yet a non-custodial plea bargain turned out, unexpectedly, to be out of reach despite the best efforts of three sets of top lawyers.

And the evidence against Aaron? MIT's facilities and Web connections were accessible to the public who identify themselves as "visitors" under MIT's "open campus" policy. They could access JSTOR through its network without pay. No lock was picked. The doors to the depository where Aaron's laptop hooked into JSTOR's hardware were never secured. Among the downloaded articles were many that had been prepared with public money and were already freely available through sites more difficult to access. There wasn't even a sign indicating that the room where Aaron connected his laptop was off limits. In fact, in response to his death, many JSTOR journal archives were made available for free to the public (how posthumously generous).

Was there anything that could have been done that could have resulted in a different outcome?

Suppose, for a moment, that we lived in an alternate reality. Suppose that we could have known, somehow, that the negotiations for a reasonable plea would be futile. Suppose that we anticipated how self-destructively Aaron would react to the prospect that his aspirations to a political career, not to mention his freedom, could be dashed by a conviction for a federal felony, which would prevent him from even voting for the rest of his life. Suppose Aaron's lawyers, versed in civil liberties law and impact litigation, had been directed to focus their energy on defending Aaron by demanding that the law under which he was charged be declared constitutionally inapplicable.

Just as Aaron helped mobilize millions of activists to bring down the hated SOPA law, could a similar mobilization have saved Aaron? Aaron's lawyers spoke truth to power. Would the outcome have been different if they spoke power to power? Didn't Aaron himself, through organized efforts, help start a campaign that flooded Congress with eight million phone calls to block SOPA, a victory so expansive that it stunned even Aaron?

Imagine a different paradigm. Let's consider a not-guilty defence of Aaron based on a strategy of broad appeal and mass mobilization. Manhattan's former top federal prosecutor had already called for the charges to be dropped. Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner had questioned the propriety of laying the charges in the first place. Law professor Stephen L. Carter described the prosecution as "ridiculous".

Would tens of thousands of American youth have responded actively to a public campaign, whether on the net, in the streets or in front of the courthouse? What impact would an international defence committee with broad public representation and prominent sponsors have had? With speaking tours for Aaron to build support on campuses and in communities? With phone campaigns to flood congress, MIT or Harvard? With crowdsourcing to raise funds for Aaron's legal defence? With legal intervention by civil liberties groups in the court case? With demonstrations at U.S. embassies around the world?

On September 16, 2012, an Aaron Swartz Defence Fund was initiated by Bettina Neuefeind (lawyer, activist, wife of Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig) when Aaron was already deeply depressed. Just three months before Aaron's death, this fund was announced with a call for public support.

Remember that Aaron's last lawyer, Elliot Peters, was aghast when the only media present during Aaron's final court appearance was a lone reporter from a student paper.

We only have a few clues to how Aaron would have reacted to a mass public campaign. We do know that Aaron felt the weight of the prosecution but spoke little of it. He hid it well (or maybe not so well). One close friend of Aaron's blamed him for taking his life without asking for help. Go easy. He was consumed by his guilt with regard to the crushing financial burden the legal defence imposed on the people who cared for him. He was frightened by the escalating threats to his ex-girlfriend, to subpoena her along with her files to implicate their friends and compel her to testify before a Grand Jury on pain of imprisonment if she refused. What some called his shyness was also Aaron's generous reluctance to enmesh others in what he saw as a personal issue.

Imagine that we appealed to Harvard's and MIT's faculty and student associations to support Aaron. They might have reacted positively in contrast to the gutless administrators who proclaimed "neutrality", putting paid to Aaron's father's hopes that they would come to Aaron's rescue. When the prosecution threatened to implicate Aaron's partner and broaden its investigation, imagine a legal strategy to push back and redouble efforts to massively publicize this tactic of blatant intimidation and blackmail. Imagine that we ringed the courthouse with a phalanx of protestors every time Aaron's case appeared in court? Could we have mobilized public sentiment in defence of Aaron?

Aaron's mood was always brightest and most combative, even exhilarated, when he mobilized the public behind him. The prospect of success in Aaron's legal battle may have been dramatically enhanced by the creation of an independent, visible, ongoing, international militant campaign in which legal tactics were subordinate to the struggle to defeat a quintessentially political prosecution under a law that was and continues to be legally indefensible. Imagine if we could have convinced Aaron to do what he was best at doing―campaigning publicly for justice!

In the real world, we know the course of events demoralized Aaron and filled him with feelings of guilt and shame for burdening his family and implicating his friends. Those who loved Aaron tried their best.

Two days after the plea-bargaining blew apart on January 11, 2013, Aaron's family was close to a million dollars in debt. He could not afford a trial.

Suppose there was a broad social and political infrastructure to supplement his legal defence. Would the Aaron that turned the online world upside down not have thrived in an uncompromising, bold, unwavering public, social, and legal struggle which looked to him for moral and political leadership? Wouldn't the same Aaron who was so deeply committed to sharing the vast store of human knowledge have also thrived as the cutting edge of a campaign to overturn an indefensible law that blocked such access?

Aaron's attempt to mobilize public support for his case -- a press release in support of his case from Demand Progress, the organization he helped found -- provoked an all-out retaliation from the U.S. prosecutors. At the first whiff of resistance, they added 13 felony counts to his charge-sheet. They understood that Aaron was attacking them on their weakest flank. In the courtroom, they would likely win -- as they obtain findings of guilt in 93 percent of federal felony prosecutions. In the streets and in the court of public opinion, and especially on the Internet, they were fighting on Aaron's home turf.

It's easy to understand Aaron's decision, and the decision of his supporters and legal team, to retreat from provoking the rage of the U.S. prosecutors who had him in their crosshairs.

But the U.S. prosecutors have shown us what to expect from capitulation. They have shown us what happens when we let them intimidate us into giving up on the only force we have that they lack.

There will be more Aarons. The CFAA is still on the books, and it one of the stupidest, most grotesque statutes in the USA, overdue for a constitutional challenge. Aaron's tactics evolved with each fight, the ones he won and the ones he lost. He lost this one, and taught us a lesson we need to remember -- next time. The key idea is to build a movement that can change the balance of forces. To build such a movement you have to have a vision -- overturn a bad law in court by pleading not guilty and protect a victim of the bad law.
It's tempting to see the farcical conviction of Barrett Brown as an example of why pushing back is a waste of effort, but
Barrett Brown did exactly the opposite. Brown is an American writer, activist and journalist from Texas who facilitated analysis of information leaked by the hacktivist collective Anonymous and other sources that exposed the private machinations of the vast intelligence contracting network. His work was seminal in translating raw data about the U.S. military-industrial complex into an accessible, centralized format to the dismay of the cybersecurity industry. Following the 2012 Stratfor email leak, the U.S. Department of Justice filed 17 charges against him, seeking to silence him forever.

Brown's only offence was posting online a publicly available link containing publicly available data that he was researching as a journalist. He accepted his guilty plea as valid. Never questioned the law itself. Agreed that he was guilty and should be punished. He thereby effectively sanctified the law itself, which criminalized the posting of links. In fact, he justified his prosecution by asking for an overall sentence of 30 months (time served). The court gave him four years for threatening a police officer and his children on YouTube while only 12 months for posting the link. So now he sits in jail after his sentencing in January.
Yes, there was a public campaign in his case. But only to get money to pay lawyers to lower his sentence and collect character-testifying letters from people in an attempt to influence the judge. It was a sympathy ploy with no focused political demand.

There was never any prospect of building a unified movement that could inspire people with a vision of doing away with this law around a clear, unifying demand.
But even assuming for the sake of argument that the cases were identical, should we conclude that just because someone loses, then everyone would lose?

Update: I stated that Aaron's prosecutors had initially offered him a carrot for pleading guilty to the initial charges, namely "a few months in jail in an open comfortable setting." I have been subsequently informed by Susan Swartz that "Unfortunately, because of Aaron's ulcerative colitis, the federal government would not allow him to be placed in a minimum security prison. They insisted that he would only be placed at a facility which had a hospital, which meant a maximum security prison, with the most violent offenders."
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The company's business model is to do cursory research to determine who might be infringing copyrights it represents, then send those users overblown (and, in Canada, fraudulent) legal threats demanding small-money payments to go away. The company made $931,000 in $20 "settlements" in 2014, but lost $3.4 overall.

The company's major risk is that more users will sue it over its illegal tactics. These lawsuits come straight out of the company's bottom line and cost it millions in legal expenses and damages.

“The Company has not yet established an ongoing source of revenues sufficient to cover its operating costs and to allow it to continue as a going concern,” the filing reads.

“The ability of the Company to continue as a going concern is dependent on the Company obtaining adequate capital to fund operating losses until it establishes a revenue stream and becomes profitable. If the Company is unable to obtain adequate capital it could be forced to cease operations. Accordingly, these factors raise substantial doubt as to the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

While the company’s accounts give cause for concern, the precarious situation is only amplified when one examines Rightscorp’s over-exposure to a limited number of copyright-holder clients. In 2014 a total of 76% of Rightscorp sales came from one client, BMG Rights Management. The company’s contract with Warner Bros. accounted for a further 13% of sales.

If the former pulled the plug (and after a one year contract BMG only needs to give 30 days notice to do so) it could be game over for Rightscorp.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/11/rightscorp-loses-big-on-extort.html/feed0UK foreign secretary: stop talking about Snowden, let spies get on with ithttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/11/uk-foreign-secretary-stop-tal.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/11/uk-foreign-secretary-stop-tal.html#commentsWed, 11 Mar 2015 11:48:38 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=371525
Philip Hammond told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute that the debate about surveillance "cannot be allowed to run on forever."

Hammond warned that debating surveillance for too long would result in spy agencies "become distracted from their task."

"We need to have it, address the issues arising from it and move on, sooner rather than later, if our agencies are not to become distracted from their task."

The minister added that he, the prime minister and the home secretary are already "determined to draw a line under the debate" with legislation.

]]>
Philip Hammond told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute that the debate about surveillance "cannot be allowed to run on forever."

Hammond warned that debating surveillance for too long would result in spy agencies "become distracted from their task."

"We need to have it, address the issues arising from it and move on, sooner rather than later, if our agencies are not to become distracted from their task."

The minister added that he, the prime minister and the home secretary are already "determined to draw a line under the debate" with legislation. This, he promised, will give the agencies the powers they need, and an oversight regime that appeases citizens.

A watering down of current practices looks unlikely, and Hammond said that the current system and its surveillance practices are in line with technology change and external threats.

"We are right to question the powers required by our agencies, and particularly by GCHQ, to monitor private communications in order to do their job. But we should not lose sight of the vital balancing act between the privacy we desire and the security we need," he said.

"From my position as foreign secretary, responsible for the oversight of GCHQ, I am quite clear that the ability to intercept ‘bulk communications data', to subject that metadata to electronic analysis and to seek to extract the tiny percentage of communications data that may be of any direct security interest, does not represent an enhancement of the agencies' powers," he said.

"Rather, it represents the adaptation of those powers to the realities of the 21st century."

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/11/uk-foreign-secretary-stop-tal.html/feed0IT feudalism: the surveillance state and wealth gapshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/10/it-feudalism-the-surveillance.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/10/it-feudalism-the-surveillance.html#commentsTue, 10 Mar 2015 11:35:13 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=371122
My latest Guardian column examines the relationship between technology, surveillance and wealth disparity -- specifically the way that cheap mass surveillance makes it possible to sustain more unequal societies because it makes it cheaper to find and catch the dissidents who foment rebellion over the creation of hereditary elites.]]>
My latest Guardian column examines the relationship between technology, surveillance and wealth disparity -- specifically the way that cheap mass surveillance makes it possible to sustain more unequal societies because it makes it cheaper to find and catch the dissidents who foment rebellion over the creation of hereditary elites.

Social stability comes at the intersection of "guard labor" -- coercive control efforts -- and beneficial social programs. The more a state spends on social programs, the more of its citizens will buy into the legitimacy of the social order, and the less it has to spend policing those citizens. By making policing vastly cheaper, the IT revolution has created a new wealth-disparity reality, in which it is more "cost effective" for elites to buy surveillance than it is for them to pay their share for the common good.

The neoliberal answer to this is: so what? If the rich can be richer than ever without the poor having to starve, doesn’t that mean that the system is working? Boris Johnson’s big cornflakes have been sorted to the top of the packet, and have produced so much efficiency that everyone is better off for it, just as market theory predicts.

Even if you think that hereditary dynasties and extreme wealth for the few and hereditary, extreme poverty for the many is morally fine, the reality is that extreme wealth concentration distorts policy. We want policy to reflect the best available evidence, but when legislators are drawn from, and beholden to, a tiny ruling elite, they can only make evidence-based policy to the extent that the evidence doesn’t inconvenience rich people.

It’s obvious that excluding 52% of the population from public life is bad for the economy in Saudi Arabia. It’s obvious that Canada, a country characterised by huge wilderness and resource-extraction, is in terrible danger from climate change and that it’s madness for its oil-backed Tory government to dismantle its world-class climate and environment science infrastructure, literally setting fire to the archives.

It’s obvious that the finance sector is corrupt to the highest levels, and that the City is the heart of a vast criminal enterprise. It’s obvious that homeopathy is bunk, even if Prince Charles likes it.

And so on. A state that is beholden to a small number of people is also beholden to that elite’s sacred cows. It is incompatible with evidence-based policy.

Why spy? Because it’s cheaper than playing fair. Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism, where property is the exclusive domain of the super-rich, where your surveillance-supercharged Internet of Things treats you as a tenant-farmer of your life, subject to a licence agreement instead of a constitution.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/10/it-feudalism-the-surveillance.html/feed0Senator on Internet privacy committee has never sent an emailhttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/09/senator-on-internet-privacy-co.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/09/senator-on-internet-privacy-co.html#commentsTue, 10 Mar 2015 01:00:34 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=370626
Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, and he's never sent an email.]]>

Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is a member of the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, and he's never sent an email.

WASHINGTON -- Discussing the controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton using her personal email account for government business, a top Senate Republican revealed that he has never sent an email in his life.

"Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd had asked Graham whether he had a private email account because Graham said he wanted to know if other cabinet secretaries besides Clinton used private accounts during their tenure. Graham said he did have a few questions about Clinton's email.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/09/senator-on-internet-privacy-co.html/feed0Italy's Hacking Team allegedly sold Ethiopia's despots cyberweapons used to attack journalistshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/09/italys-hacking-team-allegedl.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/09/italys-hacking-team-allegedl.html#commentsMon, 09 Mar 2015 18:41:44 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=370951
Ethopia's despotic regime has become the world's first "turnkey surveillance state," thanks to technology sold to it by western companies, including, it seems, Italy's Hacking Team, whose RCS spyware product is implicated in an attack on exiled, US-based journalists reporting on government corruption.]]>
Ethopia's despotic regime has become the world's first "turnkey surveillance state," thanks to technology sold to it by western companies, including, it seems, Italy's Hacking Team, whose RCS spyware product is implicated in an attack on exiled, US-based journalists reporting on government corruption.

Ethiopian Satellite Television is a consistent thorn in the ruling elite's side. Journalists there were repeatedly targeted with what appears to be a weapon from Hacking Team. Hacking Team has never confirmed that it supplies weapons to Ethiopia, and it claims that its weapons have built-in monitoring systems to prevent abuse by its customers. Ron Deibert from the University of Toronto's Citizenlab has sent an open letter to Hacking Team formally notifying it of the Citizenlab report on Ethiopia's use of spyware to attack journalists.

Dissidents and others fleeing repressive regimes have long found a degree of protection by seeking refugee status in the West. Throughout the 20th century refugees from political persecution have established thriving diaspora communities where they have been able to continue their activity without fear of physical persecution. For at least as long, the security services from the countries they left have attempted to monitor and sometimes interfere with their activities.

We have documented a year-long campaign of spyware attacks against journalists at ESAT, using what appears to be Hacking Team’s RCS spyware. Many of the journalists targeted in these attacks are legally considered US persons, and located in the US.

In its customer policy, Hacking Team notes:
“[I]n HT contracts, we require customers to abide by applicable law. We reserve the right in our contracts to suspend support for our software if we find terms of our contracts are violated. If we suspend support for HT technology, the product soon becomes useless.”We will refuse to provide or we will stop supporting our technologies to governments or government agencies . . . who refuse to agree to or comply with provisions in our contracts that describe intended use of HT software, or who refuse to sign contracts that include requirements that HT software be used lawfully.”57

The policy suggests that Hacking Team will cease support for its technology when a client violates terms of its contract by failing to abide by applicable law. The lawfulness of government targeting of individuals based in the US with spyware, however, is in question; for example, a lawsuit brought by a US citizen against the government of Ethiopia in February 2014 claims that such actions violated the US Wiretap Act [18 U.S. Code § 2511(1)( a )].58

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/09/italys-hacking-team-allegedl.html/feed0Imaginary ISIS attack on Louisiana and the twitterbots who loved ithttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/08/imaginary-isis-attack-on-louis.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/08/imaginary-isis-attack-on-louis.html#commentsSun, 08 Mar 2015 16:00:37 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=370436
Gilad Lotan has spotted some pretty sophisticated fake-news generation, possibly from Russia, and possibly related to my weird, larval twitterbots, aimed at convincing you that ISIS had blown up a Louisiana chemical factory.]]>
Gilad Lotan has spotted some pretty sophisticated fake-news generation, possibly from Russia, and possibly related to my weird, larval twitterbots, aimed at convincing you that ISIS had blown up a Louisiana chemical factory.

On September 11, 2014, Lotan, a data scientist, started researching a massive, coordinated, and failed hoax to create panic over an imaginary ISIS attack on a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana. The hoax included Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia identities (some apparently human piloted, others clearly automated) that had painstakingly established themselves over more than a month. Also included: fake news stories, an imaginary media outlet called "Louisiana News," and some fascinating hashtag trickery whereby a generic hashtag was built up in Russian Twitter by one set of bots, then, once trending, was handed over to a different set of English-language bots that used it to promote the hoax.

More interesting is the fact that the hoax failed. Lotan shows that Facebook's Edgerank proved to be resistant to gaming using the process employed by the hoax's creator(s); that Twitter clusters can be trumped by real news sources; and that Wikipedia's vigilance was adequate to catching fakesters who create hoax pages.

Lotan has some important thoughts on the future of fake news, hoaxes and political manipulation. One important takeaway from Lotan's analysis is that, despite the energy and technical sophistication of the attack, the hoaxer(s) made some dumb mistakes, like not giving their fake Wikipedian a richer, longer edit history; and not changing the sent-by string on their twitterbots (all the hoax tweets were sent by an app called "mass post" or "mass post2."

Finally, I'm fascinated to see that the bot-tweets were sufaced into real Twitter by long-standing, still-extant, apparently human piloted accounts from Russian Twitter. Are @GelmutKol, @Kiborian and @Galtaca sleeper agents who carry on normal Twitter discourse for years at a time, but every now and again promote botnoise into real Twitter? Are they regular users whose compromised PCs (or stolen passwords) are used to push out messages every now and again? Or are they spectacularly subtle bots themselves, computationally intensive members of the botherd who pass among humans?

Did this stuff kick off in Russia? Or was it a false flag from non-Russians using Russian Twitter to point attention overseas? Or a Russian firm working for hire on behalf of foreigners? Why try to create gwot-panics on Sept 10? It's head-spinningly futurismic.

There’s a very important lesson learned here, crystallized by the network graph to the left. No matter how much volume, how many tweets, or Facebook likes a campaign generates, if the messages aren’t embedded within existing networks of information flow, it will be very difficult for information to actually propagate. In the case of this hoax on Twitter, the malicious accounts are situated within a completely different network. So unless they attain follows from “real accounts,” they can scream as loud as they’d like, still no one will hear them. One way to bypass this is by getting your topic to trend on Twitter, increasing visibility significantly.

Social networked spaces make it increasingly difficult for a bot or malicious account to look like a real person’s account. While a profile may look convincingly real — having a valid profile picture, posting human readable texts, and sharing interesting content — it is hard for them to fake their location within the network; it is hard to get real users to follow them. We can clearly see this in the image above: the community of Russian bots are completely disconnected from any other user interacting with the hashtag.

The same principle holds for Wikipedia, which is even harder to game as it is easy to identify those accounts who are not really connected to the larger editing community. The more time you spend making relevant edits and the more trusted your account becomes the more authority you gain. One can’t simply expect to appear, make minor edits on three pages, and then put up a page detailing a terror act without seeming suspicious.

As our information landscapes evolve over time, we’ll see more examples of ways in which people abuse and game these systems for the purpose of giving visibility and attention to their chosen topic. Yet as more of our information propagation mechanisms are embedded within networks, it will become harder for malicious and automated accounts to operate in disguise. Whoever ran this hoax was extremely thorough, yet still unable to hack the network and embed the hoax within a pre-existing community of real users.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/08/imaginary-isis-attack-on-louis.html/feed0Improving the estimate of US police killingshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/07/improving-the-estimate-of-us-p.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/07/improving-the-estimate-of-us-p.html#commentsSat, 07 Mar 2015 17:00:41 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=370349
Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group applied the same statistical rigor that he uses in estimating the scale of atrocities and genocides for Truth and Reconciliation panels in countries like Syria and Guatemala to the problem of estimating killing by US cops, and came up with horrific conclusions.]]>
Patrick Ball and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group applied the same statistical rigor that he uses in estimating the scale of atrocities and genocides for Truth and Reconciliation panels in countries like Syria and Guatemala to the problem of estimating killing by US cops, and came up with horrific conclusions.

Ball was responding to a set of new estimates of death-by-cop produced by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the HRDAG provided a critique of the BJS's methods to show that they were significantly undercounting the bodies.

Michael Planty, chief of victimization stats for the BJS, said the agency is grappling with how to release victims’ information without violating their families’ privacy, along with other legal and logistical issues. “These are the issues we’re discussing with our data stewards and general counsel,” Planty said. “It may be that we can and will release identities, but this is something we’re working through and haven’t done in the past.” FBI spokesman Stephen G. Fischer, meanwhile, said that it doesn’t collect “personally identifiable information.”

Ball said he thinks the real reason agencies don’t release the data is to protect police officers and departments. “The only privacy protected here, I think, is going to be that of the police officers,” he said.

Planty said protecting police privacy is “not necessarily the primary” concern for his agency. Some localities, he pointed out, have laws that prevent disclosure of the identity of an officer involved in a killing. The bigger concern, he said, is that police departments might be less likely to submit reports of killings by their officers “if there is a chance of disclosure.”

Even before the report came out, the BJS had suspended its police killings count and begun work to improve it. Now the agency knows the “best case scenario,” in the words of the report, is that it was missing half of deaths.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/07/improving-the-estimate-of-us-p.html/feed0Judge who invented Ferguson's debtor's prisons owes $170K in taxhttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/06/judge-who-invented-fergusons.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/06/judge-who-invented-fergusons.html#commentsSat, 07 Mar 2015 03:59:38 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=370308
Judge Ronald J Brockmeyer -- who filled Ferguson's coffers by fining its poorest residents and sent them to inhumane, overcrowded prisons when they couldn't pay a few hundred dollars -- stands accused of fixing fines for his cronies, and owes $170K in unpaid taxes.]]>
Judge Ronald J Brockmeyer -- who filled Ferguson's coffers by fining its poorest residents and sent them to inhumane, overcrowded prisons when they couldn't pay a few hundred dollars -- stands accused of fixing fines for his cronies, and owes $170K in unpaid taxes.

Brockmeyer, who has been Ferguson’s municipal court judge for 12 years, serves simultaneously as a prosecutor in two nearby cities and as a private attorney. Legal experts said his potentially conflicting interests illustrate a serious problem in the region’s judicial system. Brockmeyer, who reportedly earns $600 per shift as a prosecutor, said last year his dual role benefited defendants. “I see both sides of it,” he said. “I think it’s even better.”

While Brockmeyer owes the US government $172,646 in taxes, his court in Ferguson is at the centre of a class-action federal lawsuit that alleges Ferguson repeatedly “imprisoned a human being solely because the person could not afford to make a monetary payment”.

“Judge Brockmeyer not being incarcerated is a perfect illustration of how we should go about collecting debt from people who owe it,” said Thomas Harvey, the director of Arch City Defenders, one of the legal non-profits representing plaintiffs who were jailed in Ferguson.

Brockmeyer did not respond to multiple emails and telephone calls requesting comment. Federal tax liens filed against Brockmeyer by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) state that he has tens of thousands of dollars in overdue personal income taxes from joint filings with his wife, Amy. He also owes tens of thousands in employer taxes for his law firm and an annual tax paid by employers to fund benefits for the unemployed. Since November 2013, Brockmeyer has paid off another three overdue tax bills totalling $64,599.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/06/judge-who-invented-fergusons.html/feed0Albuquerque PD encrypts videos before releasing them in records requesthttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/06/albuquerque-pd-encrypts-videos.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/06/albuquerque-pd-encrypts-videos.html#commentsSat, 07 Mar 2015 03:45:52 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=370303
Har-har-fuck-you, said Albequerque's murderous, lawless police department, as they fulfilled a records request from Gail Martin, whose husband was killed by them, by sending her encrypted CDs with the relevant videos, then refusing to give her the passwords.]]>
Har-har-fuck-you, said Albequerque's murderous, lawless police department, as they fulfilled a records request from Gail Martin, whose husband was killed by them, by sending her encrypted CDs with the relevant videos, then refusing to give her the passwords.

Now the APD's being sued. The firm is seeking not only access to the password-protected videos, but also damages and legal fees. According to the firm, access to these videos is crucial to determining whether or not Gail Martin has a legitimate civil rights case. Without them, the firm is no better positioned to make this call than the general public, which has only seen the lead-in and aftermath of the shooting.

This isn't the APD's only legal battle related to its IPRA non-compliance. Late last year, KRQE of Albuquerque sued it for "serial violations" of the law. That's in addition to the one it filed over a 2012 incident, in which the PD stalled on its response to a journalist's public records request before releasing the requested footage at a press conference, basically stripping the reporter of her potential "scoop."

When Straight Pride UK didn't bother to show up in court, the judge listened to WordPress's arguments about its DMCA abuse, and awarded them $25k (mostly for legal fees). It's not clear whether the US court's judgment will be enforceable against a crackpot British group, but the judgment will put easier-to-reach DMCA abusers on notice that they could pay tens of thousands for their fraud.

“The court finds the report correct, well-reasoned and thorough, and adopts it in every respect,” Judge Hamilton writes (pdf).

“It is Ordered and Adjudged that defendant Nick Steiner pay damages in the amount of $960.00 for Hotham’s work and time, $1,860.00 for time spent by Automattic’s employees, and $22,264.00 for Automattic’s attorney’s fees, for a total award of $25,084.00.”

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/06/dmca-abuser-ordered-to-pay-25.html/feed0Justice Department issues "scorching" report on Ferguson's Police Departmenthttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/05/doj-issues-scorching-repor.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/05/doj-issues-scorching-repor.html#commentsThu, 05 Mar 2015 20:00:05 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=369665
The police department "routinely" blocks citizens from recording their activities under a bizarre rubric of "officer safety," according to the Justice Department's investigation.]]>
The police department "routinely" blocks citizens from recording their activities under a bizarre rubric of "officer safety," according to the Justice Department's investigation.

The Ferguson Police -- a nearly all-white force that polices a nearly all black community, with a reputation for brutal violence and the abuse of petty civil fines as a means of sending innocents to a nightmarish local jail system -- came under fire after one of its officers murdered a young, unarmed black man, a crime for which the officer was not indicted.

In the wake of the killing, Ferguson residents and protesters have made a habit of closely recording the force, especially when it deployed military-surplus equipment to put down protests in a series of shocking exhibitions of force that included hair-trigger cops hysterically threatening news agencies with loaded automatic rifles aimed directly at reporters.

The DOJ's report found that the Ferguson PD's abuse of authority to shut down citizens who document its actions has continued unabated, with illegal suppression of recordings taking place as recently as February, 2015.

... it appears that FPD continues to interfere with individuals' rights to protest and record police activities. On February 9, 2015, several individuals were protesting outside the Ferguson police station on the six-month anniversary of Michael Brown’s death. According to protesters, and consistent with several video recordings from that evening, the protesters stood peacefully in the police department’s parking lot, on the sidewalks in front of it, and across the street. Video footage shows that two FPD vehicles abruptly accelerated from the parking lot into the street. An officer announced, 'everybody here's going to jail,' causing the protesters to run. Video shows that was one man recorded the police arresting others, he was arrested for interfering with police action. Officers pushed him to the ground, began handcuffing him, and announced, 'stopped resisting or you're going to get tased.' It appears from the video, however, that the man was neither interfering nor resisting. A protester in a wheelchair who was live streaming the protest was also arrested. Another officer moved several people with cameras away from the scene of the arrests, warning them against interfering and urging them to back up or else be arrested for Failure to Obey.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/05/doj-issues-scorching-repor.html/feed0Trolls abuse Canadian copyright law with fraudulent mass-scale extortion noticeshttp://boingboing.net/2015/03/05/trolls-abuse-canadian-copyrigh.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/05/trolls-abuse-canadian-copyrigh.html#commentsThu, 05 Mar 2015 16:55:25 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=369696
Michael Geist writes, "The launch of the Canadian copyright notice system earlier this year raised serious concerns as Rightscorp, a U.S.-based anti-piracy company, sent notices that misstated Canadian law and demanded that users pay to settle claims."

The misuse of the Canadian system was the result of the government's failure to establish regulations prohibiting misleading content or the use of notice-and-notice to demand settlements.

]]>
Michael Geist writes, "The launch of the Canadian copyright notice system earlier this year raised serious concerns as Rightscorp, a U.S.-based anti-piracy company, sent notices that misstated Canadian law and demanded that users pay to settle claims."

The misuse of the Canadian system was the result of the government's failure to establish regulations prohibiting misleading content or the use of notice-and-notice to demand settlements. Now that misuse is spreading with CEG-TEK sending thousands of notices to Canadians with settlement demands. Canadian officials did not expect the misuse, but failed to establish regulations to prevent abusive notices.

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/05/trolls-abuse-canadian-copyrigh.html/feed0First-hand reports of torture from Homan Square, Chicago PD's "black site"http://boingboing.net/2015/02/28/first-hand-reports-of-torture.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/28/first-hand-reports-of-torture.html#commentsSun, 01 Mar 2015 07:10:04 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=368642
In the wake of last week's revelations about Homan Square, the off-the-books "black site" where Chicago PD disappear prisoners for violent, aggressive interrogation, four of the site's victims have come forward to describe the highly racialized human rights abuses at the secret site.]]>
In the wake of last week's revelations about Homan Square, the off-the-books "black site" where Chicago PD disappear prisoners for violent, aggressive interrogation, four of the site's victims have come forward to describe the highly racialized human rights abuses at the secret site.

The initial report on Homan Square focused on the experience of two white anti-Nato protesters who were hidden at Homan Square as a political reprisal. But the typical Homan Square victim is black, young and male -- also the archetype of the victims of America's world-beating incarceration system overall. They were held for multi-day stints while bound, brutalized and starved.

“I sat in that place for three days, man – with no talking, no calls to nobody,” Terry told the Guardian on Friday. His friends and family could not find him: “They call police stations, I’m not there, I’m not there.”

“I was kept there. I didn’t speak to a lawyer or anything,” he continued. “I didn’t interact with nobody for three days. And then when I do see the light of day, I go straight to another police station, go straight there to county and be processed.”

Terry detailed being handcuffed in one room at Homan Square by one wrist to a “little circular thing behind the bench”, echoing the accounts of the two Nato protesters interviewed by the Guardian, though Terry said he did not have his ankles cuffed together.

Three other men, Kory Wright, Deandre Hutcherson and David Smith, have also told the Guardian they were held in 2006 inside Homan Square, where they say they were handcuffed by both wrists with their arms spread. Hutcherson says he was punched in the face while in this position, before an officer stepped on his groin “like he was putting a cigarette out”.

http://boingboing.net/2015/02/28/first-hand-reports-of-torture.html/feed0ACT NOW! Congress wants to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnershiphttp://boingboing.net/2015/02/27/act-now-congress-wants-to-fas.html
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/27/act-now-congress-wants-to-fas.html#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 23:00:01 +0000http://boingboing.net/?p=368336
Congress is about to introduce a bill that will let the US Trade Representative lock America into the provisions of the secretly negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership, without substantial debate or scrutiny -- including criminal sanctions -- jail!]]>
Congress is about to introduce a bill that will let the US Trade Representative lock America into the provisions of the secretly negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership, without substantial debate or scrutiny -- including criminal sanctions -- jail! -- for downloading TV shows.

EFF wants you to tweet key lawmakers and sign up to a petition to get Congress to fully debate TPP before considering it. The stunning victory in the Net Neutrality fight shows that your voices matter, and now's the time to press for victory on top of victory!

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks are stalling while the White House assures its trading partners that this secret trade agreement won't be amended when it comes back to Congress for ratification after the President signs the deal. That's why the Executive is scrambling to get its allies in Congress to pass Fast Track. If they succeed, the U.S. Trade Representative can block remaining opportunities for the examination of the TPP's provisions by lawmakers who could ensure that this secret deal does not contain expansive copyright rules that would lock the U.S. into broken copyright rules that are already in bad need of reform.

The Fast Track bill is likely going to be introduced as early as next week—so it's time to speak out now. Congress needs to hear from their constituents that we expect them to hold the White House accountable for the TPP's restrictive digital policies. Unless this opaque, undemocratic process is fixed, and state officials uphold the interests of users rather than trampling our rights, we have no choice but to fight trade deals like the TPP.